A Letter to You: Hope for your Children

NOTE: This letter was written in response to someone’s despair over the coming oil crisis, the possible collapse of society because of that, and the affect all of it will have on the person’s children and their future.

I understand where you live at the moment. I want to be sure you know that what I am about to say to you is not offered from a position of ignorance or denial. I know exactly what you’re talking about and what you see when you talk about the impending oil crisis and possible collapse of western culture because of it.

The hope you seek does not lie in “solutions.” The idea that one should or can “find” “solutions” to “problems” is a deep expression of the worldview that one might call western or modern or just contemporary. The thing is, that’s the worldview that got us into this mess to begin with. You can’t get out of it by staying in it. Hope does not reside there. It resides elsewhere.

In other words, it’s not about giving up oil. It’s about giving up a worldview.

It’s not about running out of oil. It’s about running out of road. This road is the path that constitutes this “western” worldview: a way of thinking about and responding to the natural world that doesn’t go any farther. Just like oil doesn’t.

So what does goes farther? What road will lead your children into a future of hope and even joy? Be patient, as I try to explain it. Words don’t fit it as well as they fit things that lie on the “western” road, so you will have to reach out and feel for it between the lines, with your heart and your soul. But please try, for your childrens’ sake as well as your own. And please try not to jump to conclusions as you read what I say, of “Oh yes. I know exactly what you mean. I have been there and done that.” I know how easy it is for people to see the similarities in the two things and so stay exactly on the road that doesn’t go anywhere.

The road that leads to hope and joy is one of being instead of doing, of receiving instead of reaching, of relationship instead of removal.

Doing and being

The worldview you live in is active, focused on “doing.” Even people who practice yoga or meditation in this worldview “do” it as an active thing. Magazines like Yoga Journal tell people how to “go farther” with their yoga practice, how to reach out for the products and services that will help them “be better”. Notice this crucial thing: not help them “be”, but “be better.” There is a directionality there, a progression. It underwrites everything in western worldview, even the “being” practices of yoga and meditation. It turns them back into “doing” practices. I won’t talk about why this happens, as it’s not germaine to the issue of hope for your children. It’s enough for you to maybe see it.

In a world of “doing,” oil matters very much. You have to make things and you have to make them better and more inexpensively, in part so you can improve your life and/or your company’s profit margin and/or the earnings on the money you hope to retire on someday. And you can’t keep doing this if you don’t have the resources to support it. Contemporary society is living way beyond (WAY beyond) environmental carrying capacity because it’s propped it up (artificially inflated it) by oil - this is the issue. If you always have to be better, to improve, to get somewhere new, to find the next neat thing, then you have to keep moving. You can’t stop or sit still. Environmental carrying capacity is a physical phenomenon that says, “sit still.” Sure, there are mild undulations, but it’s like riding ocean swells out beyond the breakers. Western worldview doesn’t want to ride the swells. It wants to catch a breaking wave and ride it in to the shore. Directionality. It’s fun, but you run out of wave and get spit out on the beach, sooner or later. Oil isn’t going to carry us any more. The wave is grounding.

So what’s the alternative? Many people assume that there would be a retooling, an adjusting, a finding of other resources (such as nuclear power). They are talking about turning around and swimming back out to sea to find and catch and ride another breaker. The effort to swim out there takes the time they think of as the critical period we face now, that they’d like to get a bit of head start on. The problem, of course, is that whatever wave you find to ride in on (“you” in a general sense), it’s going to ground too. It’s the way of the world. And then you will have to find a new one. It’s built-in, in the worldview of doing that imparts directionality to everything. There isn’t a solution that will last forever, or even a hundred years. There are biological and physical laws that preclude it. Sooner or later, you have to decide: do you want to be on the land or be in the sea? And whichever you choose, then you realize you are going to simply be there now.

So how is “being” different? Imagine yourself bobbing up and down on those ocean swells we talked about. Just hour after hour. If what you’ve been doing is surfing, it might seem boring after a bit. It might feel like, “Well, what am I supposed to DO out here?” See, there is “doing” making a come-back. So let’s let it go and keep being. What then?

What happens is that you learn about living in the space around you. You hear things you didn’t hear before. You see things you didn’t see before. Your heart rate changes. Your blood pressure changes. And you begin to realize the sea in which you gently bob is alive in ways you never understood before. Your life changes forever in ways no one can describe to another. This is what meditation is really supposed to be, and is for some people.
When you live in “being”, not being able to “go somewhere” doesn’t matter at all. Not being able to “do it better” doesn’t matter either. It all changes. The need for oil is no longer there. It simply vanishes.

What do you need when you “be” in that gently swelling sea? You need enough warmth to keep you alive and comfortable. It turns out, that’s not very much at all. And it’s right at your fingertips.

Receiving and reaching

We are not marine animals, so what we need to stay alive isn’t available in the sea of swells. So now I want to move our imagination to shore, perhaps to a mountain habitat. Let us say now that you live there and no longer in the city. What are your real needs there? Clearly, you need wood to stay warm in the winter and on cold nights of other seasons. This is just one thing, to keep it simple. And you might say that this brings you back to oil — you need gasoline for driving to a place to buy firewood, or to run your chainsaw and splitter if you harvest wood from your own land. And you might say, if pressed to consider what western culture calls “sustainability”, that the only way to stay warm without oil is to spend an inordinate amount of time doing extremely heavy manual labor — the less oil, the more labor. And you would be right about that.

But let’s push it farther. How big is the area you have to heat? If it’s smaller, you need less wood. Do you know how big the dwellings were of Indigenous peoples around the world? Did you ever wonder why they weren’t larger? Do you see the answer to that? Now consider this: the cottonwood tree is sacred to Native American peoples where it lives. It drops limbs on a regular basis. It is giving humans firewood. Look at this closely: the cottonwood tree GIVES people firewood. Let that sit a moment.

Because cottonwoods grow quickly and drop limbs, people don’t want to have them around their homes. They drop limbs on things like roofs and break them. When we were located in Texas, a big ancient one dropped a gigantic limb on a playground and crushed a child. The city cut down most of the ancient cottonwoods along the river in that area after that. They are widely called “trash trees” by landscapers. BUT the very trait that people are decrying, that they see as “bad” is really the opposite. If you live where there are cottonwood trees, you don’t have to spend days and days cutting wood to heat your home and keep your children comfortable. You just wait and Cottonwood GIVES it to you. You gather it up from time to time, and there it is. All you need. And it’s even of a nature that if you bang one end of a limb on the ground, it will split into smaller sections for easier burning. Will it give you “enough” for the winter and for cooking through the summer? That depends on how big your heated area is, and on how many families are gathering the wood from the trees you depend on. THAT is what sustainability is about. It’s about living on what is GIVEN to you. The gift determines everything that follows — how big you live, and how densely. It is honorable and Right to receive a gift with thankfulness. Imagine the way you would respond to a child who, on receiving a check for $5000 from an aunt, said, “This won’t get me through Yale! I need more than this!”

Instead of receiving, people in western culture believe they must reach for and work for what they need to survive. It’s even written right into Genesis in the Christian Bible, on which western culture is based, that “from now on, you’ll have to work by the sweat of your brow to bring food from the earth.” No. The earth GIVES food. People talk about the “stock market” and “gains” and tithing 10% and so on. Investing. That comes from the way that the Earth GIVES us food. You plant seeds, and they grow (all by themselves; we only have it in our heads that we “have” to use fertilizers and pesticides and so on to “make” them grow, and it’s only required in a system of monoculture crop plants not adapted to local regions anyway). They return your initial “investment” (putting into the ground) 10 fold or 100 fold. What company stock does that? Then you take out 10% -- the best 10% of the new seeds you could eat — and you set them aside to plant next year. That’s what tithing comes from, the whole idea. Again, I am not going into the history of this but it’s there in scholarly works and oral tradition, both. The Land GIVES us what we need to live and live well. It’s up to us to be grateful and to receive it, and to stop saying, “but that’s not enough, because I want to do THIS instead.” We can’t do “this instead” unless we prop up the system with oil or uranium. So it’s a moot point, which is “better” to do. One works and has a future. One doesn’t. It’s that simple. Maybe you begin to see what I meant, that the “solution” doesn’t lie in “finding solutions.” It lies within, in how you see and respond to the world around you.

Relationship and removal

Think of the cottonwood tree that’s despised for breaking roofs or children’s bones, and of the Cottonwood that is thanked for freely gifting firewood to those who live with it. The first is a non-relationship that is about there being a gap between the human and the tree. The human does not understand the tree. It judges the tree. Judging requires (or possibly expresses) a state of removal and of distance. The second is about relationship. Relationship is the foundation of the way you live with the Cottonwood and with the soil and water and sun and rain and animals and other plants all around you. And it changes things. It means you are, in a sense, back in that bobbing sea of swells, realizing with quiet amaze that you are swimming in and part of a living thing — perhaps even one should write The Living Thing. Our ancestors knew this. It’s the reverence that informs all the world’s oldest religious traditions, that has been destroyed in some of them.

If you can think on these things and let them work around deep inside you — not seize “things you can do” to change — but let the very cells of your spirit rework and reform themselves, then something entirely new in your life will grow from it. And it will have hope. It will unroll a new road beneath you, and it will be one you can set your childrens’ feet upon and know that they can live and have joy in their own lives, and impart it to their own children in turn. But it requires real discernment and a release of your intellectual habits to do it, and then great courage to let it unfold when you feel how different it is, the way of living that grows from the seeds still preserved in your soul’s cells, there from a thousand generations ago. But it is where hope resides. It’s there for your children, if you can find it yourself first and then hold their hands as you walk them into a new world.

With genuine hope,

Dawn Adrian Adams (Choctaw), Ph.D.